HistoryMaker Homes was literally minding its own business. It didn’t set out to become an AI-ready homebuilder. The team’s leaders set out to ensure it would remain a relevant, going-concern homebuilder 25 years from now.
That meant asking (and having a pretty damned good answer to) the two hardest questions homebuilding business leaders can ask themselves: Who are you? And who do you want to be?
The rigor with which HistoryMaker Homes CEO Nelson Mitchell and his leaders answered those questions goes a long way toward explaining why President Zac Thompson’s account of the 77-year-old Fort Worth-based builder’s transformation matters right now.
In 2023, HistoryMaker reached its 75th anniversary. Rather than treating the milestone strictly as a celebration, Thompson and his leadership team used it to face a less comfortable reality.
“We realized if we wanted to make it to 100, what got us to 75 probably wouldn’t get us to 100,” Thompson told me.
What followed was less a technology initiative than a personality transplant.
For most of its history, HistoryMaker had succeeded as a low-cost provider, with affordable first-time-buyer housing at the center of its business. Cost management, construction, and operational efficiency naturally occupied the center of the company’s universe.
But the competitive landscape was changing. Scale advantages increasingly favored large public builders, particularly in Texas. HistoryMaker’s leadership concluded that a regional, private, family-owned builder couldn’t build its next 25 years on winning a cost fight against companies with far greater purchasing, land, and capital scale.
So HistoryMaker changed what was at the center: the DNA. Out went the lowest-cost positioning. In came business resiliency’s eternal right answer: the customer.
“We kind of took on this mantra that we were going to obsess over the customer,” Thompson said. “And when we did that, I mean all kinds of things changed and got flipped upside down.”
AI would only come later, but it was squarely in the path.
Change the business first
That sequence may be the most useful part of HistoryMaker’s experience for builders now under pressure to develop an AI strategy. HistoryMaker began with and continues with a business strategy.
Moving from a low-cost provider toward product differentiation forced the company to reconsider its product, customer experience, organizational processes, and eventually the systems connecting them.
Its existing technology environment reflected the company it had been.
“We joke that the extent of our technology was our ERP system to manage POs, construction scheduling, and Microsoft,” Thompson said.
Like many builders, HistoryMaker largely regarded its ERP as a back-office system. A customer-centered business needed information to travel much closer to the customer and then flow back through the organization without requiring people to continually translate between disconnected systems.
That realization set HistoryMaker on a path that has included a new ERP environment, connected customer and operating systems, a data warehouse, new design capabilities, and partnerships with technology providers.
Chief Digital Officer Ty Brewer has described the objective as moving from siloed assumptions toward “shared truth,” providing functions across the company with access to common information and creating an operating environment that can adapt as the business evolves.
Only after that foundation began to take shape did AI start to look less like an abstract technology trend and more like an operating capability.
“We’re still not really talking about AI that much,” Thompson told me in July. “What we have been doing is preparing a technology stack and a focus on the customer that, as AI advances and builders and builder partners figure out how AI really benefits us, we will be ready for it.”
They didn’t start with AI. They made themselves better at using it.
The makeover reaches the product
Product, i.e., floor plans and elevations, provides one of the clearest examples. As recently as 2024, HistoryMaker was still closing homes using some floor plans originally designed in the late 1990s.
Its strategic pivot demanded a more differentiated product offering, but redesigning a portfolio the traditional way would have required time and resources a regional builder doesn’t have in abundance.
HistoryMaker partnered with Higharc and ultimately rolled out roughly 60 new floor plans over about 18 months. The transformation also covered purchasing, construction documentation, ERP integration, sales and marketing and other parts of the end-to-end building lifecycle.
Instead of myriad over-layered, concurrent workflows, it led to a single, interoperable system.
Thompson describes HistoryMaker’s approach to AI adoption as “crawl-walk-run.” By August, he said the company might finally be standing up and entering the walk phase.
Notice the humility. Zac and the HistoryMaker team aren’t positioning themselves as the builder who cracked AI. Quite the opposite. Thompson readily describes himself, and to some extent his organization, as novices trying to understand how quickly changing technology can deliver practical business value.
The competitive insight Thompson willingly shares is that HistoryMaker doesn’t necessarily have to invent that technology itself.
“I can’t go raise the capital to spend 2 million bucks this year on AI building my own proprietary tool,” Thompson said at HousingWire’s AI Summit in August.
Instead, HistoryMaker has deliberately sought technology companies capable of making those investments and has then partnered with them. For a regional builder competing with companies many times its size, that is another form of leverage.
Change the engine while flying the plane
Transformation would be difficult enough in a good housing market. HistoryMaker didn’t get that luxury. The strategic shift began around mid-2023, just before the operating environment became progressively less forgiving. Thompson is unusually open about what that has meant.
“When you add a market headwind, like a — I think we’re at a housing recession — it’s one thing to do all of this when you have a 2021-2022 tailwind,” he said.
Had HistoryMaker known what the following three years would look like, Thompson acknowledged, leadership would probably have spent considerably more time debating whether the timing was right.
By then, however, the transformation was underway.
“Plane’s off the ground,” he said. “We can’t jump out.”
That created the predicament many builders recognize. The existing business still has to sell, build, and close homes. Margins and cash matter. People have day jobs. Meanwhile, changing core operating systems consumes time, talent, and capital before many of the benefits appear. HistoryMaker has had to keep deciding what to defer and what it has no choice but to keep investing in.
“We can’t start homes without a commitment to learning and adapting along with the technology,” Thompson said.
That’s transformation in real time, on real job sites, with real customers and a strict set of covenants on project and entity financing that must be met.
Reduce uncertainty
For all the technology underneath HistoryMaker’s makeover, Thompson keeps returning to a decidedly human measure of whether it works. His word, not ours: uncertainty.
“Buyers do not like uncertainty,” he said. “As much as we can do to reduce uncertainty, the more likely we are to convert buyers, and we view technology and how we’re using it as a path to reduce uncertainty.”
Does better-connected product information make it easier for customers to understand what they’re buying? Can digital systems reduce friction across discovery, sales, design, and construction? Can better data give employees greater confidence in their decisions? Can AI eventually identify patterns, automate work, or surface insights that people couldn’t see when the underlying information was siloed across separate systems?
If those questions have ‘yes’ as the answer, AI becomes integral to how the business operates rather than another piece of bolt-on software someone purchased.
A field guide for what comes next
That’s why Thompson belongs in our Built for This series, leading up to the HousingWire Homebuilder Summit, Oct. 19-21 in Dallas.
The previous installments have examined Michael Bergman’s production discipline at National Home Corp.; Doug French’s relentless focus on operating fundamentals at StyleCraft Builders; Kevan and Ayesha Shelton’s effort to integrate repeatable production practices with deeply local knowledge at Park Street Homes; and Char Kurihara’s cross-functional model of “interwovenness” at DRB Group.
HistoryMaker adds another tough-sledding navigational wayfinder.
Sometimes improving what you control means admitting that the organization built to succeed yesterday isn’t necessarily organized to succeed tomorrow.
That is a harder leadership decision than choosing an AI application.
It means deciding what the business will compete on. Placing the customer in a different place in the decision hierarchy. Reconsidering processes built on old assumptions. Connecting information that grew up in separate functions. Investing even as the current business still has to perform. Then technology can accelerate something worth adding velocity to.
Thompson will bring that experience to the HousingWire Homebuilder Summit in October, where the purpose of these Built for This conversations is increasingly coming into focus: to assemble a practical field guide from operators doing the work while the market is still testing them.
With apologies to our 35th President John F. Kennedy’s mad, immemorial skills at turning a phrase:
Ask not what AI can do for your business.
Choose who the business is and what it needs to become.
